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Meyerland brought up a good point. How is a private education system going to handle kids who are expensive to educate? That is very concerning.
A good analogy might be private prisons, many of which have come under scrutiny for inmates dying due to lack of medical care or from injuries sustained from another inmate due to lack of adequate staff to stop fights.
In California there are around 9,000 inmates are housed in out of state private prisons- those prisons get a fixed reimbursement for each inmate and will only accept inmates who are healthy and have been screened by a psychiatrist (clearly to keep their costs down) California has proactively tried to get ahead of this by having their own personnel assigned to oversee daily operations of out of state prisons and it looks like that is working pretty well.
But it is starting to become clear that in many states when a private prison ends up with 'too many' sick inmates or too many 'violent' ones they are either unable or unwilling to devote the resources to remedy the situation and they don't have any real system of oversight (see links below)
If all we have is private schools and they get too many handicapped kids, or too many with emotional problems or ESL kids, and the costs skyrocket, then what do they do? Go back to the taxpayer for more money? Cut back on services to kids? Or maybe close their doors? They can't just sit there and lose money they have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to make money. Who will be overseeing the private schools? Do they police themselves or will it be a bureaucrat sitting at a desk 200 miles away?
and it costs a million bucks a year.If everyone in the district did the same thing, the cost would be staggering.
Not necessarily. My background is in the delivery business to multiple addresses all over the place. Certainly costs would increase but you adjustments would made to meet the different demands. You have to remember if you're allocating resources elsewhere since you only have Xa mount of students the demand for those resources necessarily drops in another part of the system. You need a comprehensive plan with coordination amongst the districts. Perhaps even the older student could take advantage of public transportation with a free pass.
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Also, tax money going towards religious schools with no accoutability will not sit well with the average tax payer.
First and foremost they are accountable to the parents. I think it's safe to say that most parents are going to seek the best education for their child. Of course there would be the fringe that might want to set up some ridiculous curriculum but as I said perhaps some minimal standards to prevent that. Those standards would be applied to all schools accepting public money, public or private. The problem with excluding religious schools is the Catholic schools perform well, they already have a vast amount of experience and the resources in place.
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Also, that 15,000$ doesn't go toward each child. It follows the child, but some kids are very very expensive to educate and others are not. (Due to IEPs, tutoring, special programs, speech issues etc...) it goes into the same pot, but it's not equally distributed. I really don't see pop up private schools wanting to take these expensive students and losing money on them. Are we going to change the laws so we don't have to provide for them?
Slightly off topic but it never made sense to me to be spending the most amount of money on students that are going to be the least productive citizens. That's not to say they should be kicked to the curb either.
In any event for what I believe is the third time I'll say you set a quota if the school is accepting public funding. For X amount of regular students they need to take in X amount of special needs. You could actually end with much better system with perhaps multiple districts/private schools consolidating services into one school for these students.
What is the point of privatization, to ensure all students get access to better educations or to pay for children's private education that can already afford it and are good candidates for it?
The pilot program here in PA that was being proposed would have applied to just the lowest performing and subsequently poorest districts. Eventually it would have been expanded to all districts in years ahead. The push back for the teachers unions was enormous to say the very least.
I think home schooling would see a huge rise. These days, all you need is a computer and an internet connection to access the best education resources out there.
I'm thinking of the Khan Academy.
There's plenty of high quality lectures that are posted online. Free access.
You can get standard textbooks easily.
Schooling has always been up to the parents, whether a kid goes to a real school or not.
Kids learn to socialize in public school. Without that, there would be more division among the races than there now is. Can you imagine if children did not learn to get along with others except their own relatives? If all schools were private school, kids would be segregated according to income.
Children socialize with children of other races and income levels during play dates, arts rehearsals, during league sports, at the city park / swimming pool, at church, at camp, etc.
To assume that kids would never interact with anyone outside their race and socio-economic status if not for public schools is short-sighted.
Meyerland brought up a good point. How is a private education system going to handle kids who are expensive to educate? That is very concerning.
A good analogy might be private prisons, many of which have come under scrutiny for inmates dying due to lack of medical care or from injuries sustained from another inmate due to lack of adequate staff to stop fights.
*snip*
If our success with private prisons is any indication, I think having only private schools is a pretty awful idea
Strawman.
And no, comparing schools to prisons is not a good analogy, in fact, it's a terrible analogy. The logical extension of such is comparing children to prisoners, which is both unconscionable and irrational.
The pilot program here in PA that was being proposed would have applied to just the lowest performing and subsequently poorest districts. Eventually it would have been expanded to all districts in years ahead. The push back for the teachers unions was enormous to say the very least.
We do have charter schools and magnet public school programs in Houston ISD and they are actually trying to get rid of the magnet programs due to the high cost. Some of the charters are good, some are terrible and the state shuts them down.
The transportation is a combination of school buses and public buses depending on the age and route. In an urban environment with bad traffic, it's costly. ( a million a year and it only services a small amount of HISD students.) It means more buses on the road to service spread out students. Sometimes I see a few students riding the bus. Now it might be that it was full and just is at the end of its school route.
In a smaller twon, the busing is probably not that big of a deal, but there would also be less choice of schools.
I taught in another school district that serviced the poorest students in Houston, called AliefISD. They did a better job in some aspects. They have an alternative learning center, where they put severely disruptive students until they were able to return to the regular campus. It was very effective, although they really only focused on discipline and not academics.
I would like to see a reduced amount for vouchers that matches what the student needs.
A gifted kid gets 5 grand, a regular kid gets 7 grand, an ELL (English Language Learner) gets 10 grand, SE gets 10-25. Some kind of graduated rate. Also parents who cross a dollar amount get a minimum number for each type of student. The extra money given by the federal government would make up the rest. (Title 1 money)That probably mirrors what happens in the public school, and makes the disadvantaged students more attractive to schools.
You could start small and have one kinder group at a school get vouchers and the ability to attend a better public school campus.maybe there is only a couple of choices so transportation isn't bad. You rarely have any testing done in that year, so few students would need SE services. Usually it's speech or Fine/gross motor skills.
The vouchers could only be used in campuses that meet the state standards with some type of standardized testing.(Stanford or Iowa) There would have to be some type of independent yearly ARD to check that a SE student is getting what they need.
There would have to be public schools to help with students who don't fit in the private schools. Maybe there are some individualized campuses, with one for disruptive students. Those campuses would need extra money for security and pay the staff more. Maybe through stipends similar to ELL or bilingual ones.
A gifted school would be attractive and wouldn't be as expensive. You could have larger classes and possibly students learn at their own rate. Maybe utilize more technology.
I would like to see a reduced amount for vouchers that matches what the student needs.
A gifted kid gets 5 grand, a regular kid gets 7 grand, an ELL (English Language Learner) gets 10 grand, SE gets 10-25.
I'm not sure why you would penalize the gifted students, that's a race to the bottom. This is one of the reasons other countries are outpacing us, they are allocating their resources to students who can best utilize it. That's not say we kick these lower performing students to the curb but to allow the higher performers to rot on the vine just becsue they will be able to cope better is absurd.
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A gifted school would be attractive and wouldn't be as expensive. You could have larger classes and possibly students learn at their own rate. Maybe utilize more technology.
With the a voucher system that every student can take advantage of I think the choices would expand dramatically for everyone. Music, science, vocational or special needs. Existing schools or new schools that would emerge would have an incentive to adapt their curriculum to attract a specific kind of student instead of them all trying to cover many bases.
It's 1400$ per student, instead of a few hundred. So that's 12,000 students out of...213,000.
There is no doubt costs are going to increase but you need an overhaul of the transportation system. That said whenever I see numbers like this just thrown around 99 times out of hundred if dig into them I'm going to come up with numerous inconsistencies. The first thing I would look at here is if they have included whatever savings they should have with the existing transportation and if they have taken advantage of them.
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As it stands, some buses travel across the city with only a few students.
A large bus that is expensive to purchase and expensive to operate driving kids across the city when a small van will suffice is just insane. How many of the other buses they are no longer utilizing are driving around half empty?
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